Conventionally, a fare box (refer to Japanese Patent 2008-97431A) to receive fares paid by passengers is installed in the public transportation such as a bus or a streetcar. A fare box is provided with a coin acceptor, a bill acceptor, a magnetic card reader, a smart card reader to receive fares in response to various payment methods. Coins received by a coin acceptor and paper bills received by a bill acceptor are stored in a cashbox provided in the fare box.
However, the states of bills inserted into a bill acceptor are various, and, for example, a wrinkled bill may be inserted. Then, there is a risk that the wrinkled bill causes a paper jam on a bill transportation passage in a main body of the fare box. There is also a risk that a bill validator, which is embedded inside a fare box to identify the legitimacy and denomination of bills, stops acceptance of bills by being disabled by a smudge or a trouble inside thereof from properly validating bills, and experiences a jam of a bill due to a malfunction thereof.
When a fare box has stopped properly accepting bills due to jamming of a bill or a mechanical breakdown, a waiting passenger cannot use a bill to pay the fare. A fare box is usually locked in order to prevent passengers and crews from performing illicit acts, and people other than a person having the authority to manage a key for the fare box are not allowed to perform internal maintenance. Therefore, even at the occurrence of jamming of a bill in a fare box, the cover of the fare box cannot be opened to resolve the trouble, and it requires the operation of the bus to be continued in the condition where bills cannot be accepted until the bus is forwarded to a garage after the end of the operation.
Therefore, for example, a technique (refer to Japanese Patent 2002-293468A) employing a bypass passage provided as an alternative pathway inside of a bill transportation unit apart from a normal passage (a bill normal transportation passage) to send bills was devised for transporting a bill to the cashbox through the bypass passage after the occurrence of jamming of a bill in the bill normal transportation passage. Even with the occurrence of jamming of a bill or a breakdown in the bill normal transportation passage, transportation of bills to be accepted later is allowed through the bypass passage by the adoption of this technique, whereby continuously accepting bills without dissolving jamming of the bill or the breakdown is made possible.
In the technique of Japanese Patent 2002-293468A, however, a bill acceptor is shared by the bill normal transportation passage and the bypass passages although these two passages are separately provided. Therefore, when the bill validator is disabled from determining the legitimacy of bills as a result of jamming of a bill or a breakdown in the bill normal transportation passage, a passenger cannot see whether a bill can be received and may hesitate to insert a bill. Further, a passenger may try to insert a bill without knowing that acceptance of bills has been stopped. This requires an extra time for the passenger to board or exit the bus, which brings the risk that the bus may fall behind the schedule. Thus, countermeasures to receive a bill smoothly after the occurrence of jamming of a bill or a breakdown are in demand.